Fly swatter? Who needs one?

Monday

Aug 19, 2013 at 12:01 AMAug 19, 2013 at 10:11 AM

Gordon Rupp's idea of a good time is to crack open a beer, sit on the back porch of his Morada home and listen to the hopeless buzzing of flies as they are slowly digested in the bowels of his meat-eating pitcher plants.

Alex Breitler

Gordon Rupp's idea of a good time is to crack open a beer, sit on the back porch of his Morada home and listen to the hopeless buzzing of flies as they are slowly digested in the bowels of his meat-eating pitcher plants.

"This entertains me," said Rupp, a perfectly pleasant electrical contractor who moved here from Los Gatos five years ago.

"Plus, that's one less fly in my dinner," he added.

Stockton has few carnivorous plant growers, despite a favorable climate. Rupp tried to start a Stockton Carnivorous Plant Club online, and two years later, it has four members.

It's not that the plants are hard to find, or that the public finds them too morbid.

It's that most people treat them like novelty toys and have no idea how to care for them.

"It's an emotional purchase," Rupp said. "Your 6-year-old kid wants a Venus fly trap, so you get him one - but if it sits in the house, obviously it's going to die. And if you stick hamburger in it, that kills the plant right there."

First, there are the curious folks who constantly poke the traps so that they'll open and close. What people don't realize is this costs the plant a tremendous amount of energy, with no reward for its effort, said Lodi's Randy Baxter, a biologist and locally recognized carnivorous plant owner.

"You're working them out and putting them to bed hungry," Baxter said. "You do that two or three times, and you've burned out the whole trap."

Then, there are the novelty seekers who quickly become bored, perhaps discarding the plants on a living-room shelf where they're not likely to catch a sufficient number of insects.

And finally, there are the well-intentioned owners who simply don't have the knowledge they need to raise these plants properly. These are the folks who dump copious amounts of tap water on their carnivorous friends, not knowing that water from the faucet is too salty for them.

So by all means, get carnivorous plants, Rupp and Baxter say. But take the time to learn what they need first.

"It does take some patience and regular vigilance to keep them alive," Baxter said. "But these plants have a lot of appeal to them."

Dozens of pitcher-plant tubes thrust upward from a single planter in Rupp's back yard. One recent morning he took one of the narrow tubes and cut it down the middle with a pair of scissors, revealing an untold number of flies in various stages of decomposition.

Sometimes, the plant's catch is so great that the tubes bend over beneath the weight of the kill.

You'd think the bugs might wise up eventually. But they can't resist the plants' bright colors, and the sweet nectar they produce. Sometimes Rupp watches as they fly into the top of the tube, get drunk off the nectar and fall in. Unable to escape, they are digested in the very juices that they once found so appealing.

Terrible way to go, Rupp admits.

Some of his plants have backward-growing hairs to ensure trapped insects cannot climb out. The sticky tentacles of his sundew plant attract insects and then fold over on top of them, "like a catcher's mitt," Rupp says.

A small moth, likely captured the night before, was stuck to one of these plants and had not yet been digested.

"It'll liquidate it," Rupp said proudly. "Turn it into a blob."

He got interested after reading an article on carnivorous plants. A Google search directed Rupp toward a shop called California Carnivores, in Sebastopol. The store bills itself as the largest carnivorous plant retailer in the country.

Rupp is also a beekeeper, so bees are the only victims that he'll rescue from the clutch of a plant.

He never feels guilty about the others, he said. "Gotta feed my plants."

Most growers don't have enough plants to actually put a dent in the local insect population, but still, it's a "moral victory," said Baxter.

"On a good day, when the pitchers are just mature and are putting out a lot of nectar, you can practically watch the insects fall into them," he said.

"My general experience is that people are fascinated by these plants," he added. "But they just don't make the time to go the last couple of yards and figure out what they have to do to keep these things alive."